Comedy Quotes

“New Yorkers - the people are so honest. If you're sucking on stage, they'll let you know.”

“Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.”

“Comedy is acting out optimism.”

“Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.”

“For me, comedy starts as a spew, a kind of explosion, and then you sculpt it from there, if at all. Maybe it comes from anger, because I'm outraged by cruel absurdities, the hypocrisy that exists everywhere, even within yourself, where it's hardest to see.”

“The improv, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it does, it's like open-field running.”

“You can start any "Monty Python" routine and people finish it for you. Everyone knows it like shorthand.”

"When you're onstage with Chris Rock, anything can happen. He is one of the greatest comic geniuses we've ever seen."

“A stand-up comic is judged by every line. Singers get applause at the end of their song no matter how bad they are.”

“The last thing I'd learn, well into my career, was how to get on, how to say hello, how to get in with the audience.”

“If you tell the truth about how you're feeling, it becomes funny.”

“I think we're all good and bad, but good's not funny. Bad is funny. Suppress the good and let the bad out, and then you can be funny.”

“I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.”

“I guess I still feel that I'm a comedian; if I had to pick one thing that I feel like I could do, it would be that. That doesn't mean that I like it, but I feel that's what I am.”

“It's that I wasn't suited to do the kind of comedy that these people were coming to hear: mainstream comedy.”

“There's a sense of spontaneity, and no emphasis on jokes in this show. People generally talk the way they talk in life if you were in this particular situation.”

“I gave a funny speech at my wife's birthday party, and I'm thinking, "Hey, I've still got it."

“People don't yell nasty things at actors; they let them continue.”

“I did stand-up, weird and ignorant stuff about my career, anything for a laugh.”

“We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.”

"A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure."

Charlie Chaplin

"All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl."

Charlie Chaplin

"If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you."

Billy Wilder

"I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician."

Charlie Chaplin

"Humor is just another defense against the universe."

Mel Brooks